...This group and sessions have cracked open a creative world previously unknown to me.
Great opportunity to lose yourself in new creative adventures, having fun and new things to learn each week.
Grainne...
The creative wellbeing sessions were life enhancing and enjoyable for me. The activities we engaged in were playful and allowed us to share some of our lives and our vulnerabilities more quickly and easily than is often the case in ordinary social life. The sessions opened up the possibilitity of looking at and experiencing my ordinary daily life with a lively creative edge.
I am very grateful. Catherine S...
Creative Wellness
VENUE. GLASTHULE Co. Dubline
Close to Dart, buses & car-parking close by
POETRY, TODAY Sat 10th May, 2025 in Dunlaoghaire 2pm Lexicon Level 3 I'll be reading my poem included in Washing Windows V 'Women Revolutionise Irish Poetry 1975 - 2025' (Arlen House '25) alongside others included in this extensive anthology The book was reviewed in Stokestown last Saturday and officially launched and celebrated in Books Upstairs last night. Others simultaneously reading from it at 2pm at Waterford Gallery of Art today. Editors are Nuala O'Connor and Alan Hayes. Look out for it! Next week readings in Charlie Byrne's Bookshop FRI 16th May 6pm and Ennistymon, Salmon The Salmon Bookshop & Literary Centre SAT 17th 2pm. Deansgrange Library 28th May 6pm.... Belfast, and Manhattan (June) Manhattan, London, Irish Literary Society, September
A warm welcome promised, we began with talking about how taking a different perspective on something - whether in art, writing or in thinking about a challenge faced - can bring about a new beginning.
Resistance, along with the fear of daring, to be creative has probably been the most recurring theme with the group allowing us to air and counteract underlying socialised out-of-date mores.
The synergy of being in a group with this focus has confirmed that people find it difficult to admit to/ start out with and/or to maintain commitment to keeping the creative muscles flexed.
We've explored the value of doodling, painting on stones (with some gorgeous results) and mark-making - in relation to early art, having fun and as a core artistic tool.
Sharing memories of funtimes, knowing that such memories get the happy hormones flowing.
Firstly acknowledging the need to grieve in life, the inevitability of general anxiety and times of unhappiness, as well as more intense related experiences that can benefit from additional help, being creative in how we approach life, difficulties and our own creativity is invaluable. Sometimes particularly in how we connect and re-connect with others.
Out, About & In Touch. On the current Creative Wellbeing twelve week course we've also looked at Design Thinking. We've read and written some poetry. Interesting pieces have been shared based on memoir. Incidentally most of the writing has been inspiring to read. The art of knowing, based on a book of the same name and the power of following the process in art-making - similarly inspired by a book - both from renowned art therapists are up next and then we'll pull it all together as we review and that's it for this year.
As a retired psychotherapist, with a few poetry books under my belt, and helped by an art therapist when undergoing treatment for early cancer over a decade ago, I wanted to combine experience from all three in facilitating this course.
After initial free Taster sessions held in Walters Bar-Venue in Dunlaoghaire in the Spring we are on week nine of the first twelve week course now having found a Glasthule venue.
My own first step was to join a weekly Writers group in Wicklow town, advertised for chat as well as encouraging writing. Encouraged, my second was to re-join Toastmasters (word related events clearly tend to draw me) - having left the Corrib Club in Oranmore over a decade ago.
Finding a voice again there, I thought I'd give a go at facilitating this course, the idea for which had been bubbling on the back burner of my mind for a long itme - since in fact, the time when I began facilitating Having the Conversation - About ... through sharing relevant poems. Conversations I facilitated at festivals in Galway. One of those poetry related Conversation groups in my former neighbourhood allows me to continue to visit there twleve years later with enormous pleasure and to my astonishment.
Enjoy creative advent, solstice and festive seasons!
Susan
email: creativewellbeingsl@gmail.com
Looking forward to revisiting The Crane Bar, Sea Road Galway on the Friday 6th October.
I have so many happy memories of attending launches there before returning to live on the east coast. So extra pleased to be reading my own poem Tiger Skin this time. The poem was inspired by the work of Pam Fleming exhibited in her exhibition in Kinvara in 2022.
I'm honoured to be included along with other contributors who I am looking forward to hearing on the night and/or to reading their work inside the covers.
That, even they, did let their guard down affirms the importance of what the Professor of Health Psychology and member of the UK Sage committer, Lucy Yardley, had to say about the importance of recognising how well people are doing at keeping the virus under control and the need to offer solutions to the problems they experience that have them lapse. To offer solutions to the difficulties that lead them to drop their guard instead of chastising the outriders breaking the rules.
(see my blog of Oct, 18th
https://susanlindsayauthor.blogspot.com/2020/10/could-lives-be-saved-by-asking-and.html)
Arguably it is also essential though, perhaps even more essential for the long term, that we don’t become so adapted to distancing that we forget what it is to be human and to care and to reach out to touch each other in ways that have been demonstrated in the past to be as necessary, and possibly more necessary, than food and drink for our survival.
If we don’t
recognise this and find solutions for the medium term, psychology and mental
health and wellbeing may have its own
way of demonstrating that far from being the poor relation of medicine it can
take centre stage when ignored too long.
Debates continued about
the need to further enforce lockdown in this horribly serious international
game with so much to play for or, as the DCU Professor reminded us is more
important, on how to keep each other onside, given that all the research has
shown that it is only the onside public who will win the war in the long-term. Debate
which culminated in this cameo moment in RTE.
This with
a back-drop of intense media support for opposition ‘scrutiny’ of the
appointment of a supreme court judge who dropped his guard and then stupidly tried to blag it out instead
of immediately offering his resignation (at that stage a few months or a year’s
deferral of taking up his appointment would have been fine) suggesting he is
indeed not the judge we’d wish him to be but who nevertheless has not done
anything worthy of the initiating of impeachment procedures that opposition
self-promotion has brought to be considered.
Brexit
deadlines appear to come and go like streams that emerge from the mountains when there’s heavy rainfall.
Where once they would
have had us glued to our screens they get minimum ‘scrutiny’ now. Further
evidence too, of the determination of Fianna Fail members of the Dail to do
everything possible to undermine their leader, finally Taoiseach, in their
attempts to appease their lobbying constituents or further their own end games.
I’ve never felt as much wish that someone would get behind Michael Martin and give him a chance.
Same
goes for the rest of the government. The Greens were probably right. This is a
time we’d have been better to have a National Government but we are where we
are as we horribly say as in ‘if it was there I was going it wouldn’t be here I’d
be starting from’. This is the place we have to travel on from.
Everyone in
government are doing a great job, as in probably the best they can, with the
dogs baying at their heels and so are the rest of us – most of the time. It
would be just great if the begrudgers – albeit desperate in their own
particular circumstances – would catch on and start playing for the home team
to the greater good of not only everyone else but, ultimately, themselves too.
As my daughter said,
even on public transport when the announcements started telling you why you
were delayed or how long the delay is expected to last and promise regular updates,
everyone relaxes and gets on with doing what they can. Why can’t utility
companies, businesses, the government, back-benchers and the media learn this
lesson too? Thank-you to every one of you who are doing exactly that and trying
to do it better.
You could possibly save yourself from becoming ill and from the embarrassment of inadvertently spreading the virus to your team-mates, family, friends by asking and answering a simple question.
As well as paradoxically finding that
‘most people believe [that] people should follow the rules yet when it comes to their own behaviour they don’t follow the rules’, ‘
‘surveys also show that people have very high levels of intending to do everything necessary and report trying to do it most of the time. And where people fail to do it, it’s not really that they’re deliberately trying not to do it it’s that, often for personal reasons, it’s quite difficult for them to do it’.
This was Lucy Yardley’s answer to the paradox put to her, above, by
Andrew Marr yesterday morning (Sunday
morning 18th October, 2020) on his weekly show on BBC television.
Professor of Health Psychology at Southampton University, Lucy Yardley OBE is a member of the Sage committee that advises the UK government in relation to the pandemic. She continued by saying,
‘Sometimes people can’t do it because they can’t afford to and people have all sorts of other personal reasons where they might have to feel they bend the rules a little and where people are not following the rules. It’s not necessarily [that] they’re doing it in a really blatant … risky way. A lot of people are, for example - when they’re asked to self-isolate, nipping out to do “one last shop”, because they don’t want to bother people with having to do it for them and they don’t really think they can get online and do it. It’s not really the kind of deliberate non-adherence that you might think.’
Lucy Yardley thinks that success in keeping the virus
sufficiently under control so that our hospital systems have not been overwhelmed
is down to how well people have being doing - a success she thinks we might be
better focussing on than on our failure to keep to the rules.
She says,
‘… it might be a question of helping identify where people are finding it difficult to do infection control and coming up with positive solutions.’
The distance between us narrowed in the collegiality of our grief
I know that, with hindsight, I didn’t keep the social
distance I rigidly adhere to – even outside – on the one occasion I was outside
with neighbours and intent on having a moment to honour, and then wave good-bye
to, the remains of a lively neighbour who had suddenly passed away as result of
an accident abroad. The distance between us narrowed in the collegiality of our
grief. In family, too, I lose sight of my good intention. In the moment it
seems so much more important to connect.
Happiness is most experienced in moments of forgetfulness.
Flow experiences researched by author Csikszentmihalyi and described in his
book of the same name make us happy. We may experience them when writing - maybe that’s the reason for this piece, it
makes me happy to write it – making music, in sport, being creative and the
other myriad ways we momentarily experience forgetfulness. No wonder we want to
jubilantly hug the fellow supporters of our favourite team or groan together in
despair and leave all thought of the pandemic behind for a moment of respite.
Unfortunately they’re also the moments when the opportunity arises for the
virus to jump the now non-existent gap. Flea-like it can hope merrily from
person to person.
Here’s the question that could save a life, or keep you from the ignominy of discovering you’ve inadvertently become a super spreader.
What is your personal let out from following the guidelines? When do you feel your personal circumstances require you to be a little more flexible? When do you find you forget to follow your good intention?
Of course the follow-on question
it would be good to find an answer to is: what could you do differently to both
remind yourself of your good intention in the moment and find a way to stick
with it?
I don’t know how not to forget it all sometimes.
I think a lot of us are embarrassed to appear to be following rules too rigidly. I certainly know I feel embarrassed when I think people are looking at me a little pityingly. I assume they think I’m afraid, see my behaviour as an understandable lack of courage in the face of the fear of being a certain age with a possibly compromised immune system. I can face the look down. We’re in this together. But I don’t know how not to forget it all sometimes. Surely it’s not beyond the IT world to add a tone of reminder when we get too close to others? I'wondering what other remedies we might collectively be creative enough to put in place so that we can support each other to remember, and act in accord with, our best intentions.
